Jean Katambayi Mukendi

"In Congo to be late is like a poem."

Mukendi is less a sculptor than a fractal force of nature. He's an energy bloom, unfolding in endless variations of rhyming forms. Let's start with the show within a show, embedded in the robot's chest. Does it work? "The robot works," he says, "as art." The robot (a word from the Czech robota meaning the work done as a serf for a feudal lord and repurposed by Karl Čapek as an automaton built to serve humans) is a powered statue, which mirrors a statue of power - a luyingu, a classic Congolese sculpture.

Inside the robot is a model of a museum, daring the world to build it, with an exhibition of tiny Mukendi copper sculptures, installed in a multilevel puzzle of a building. Perhaps this museum is the recipient of restituted artworks; he's quick to point out that regarding the repatriation of works to the Congo, "Where's it going to go?" Certain things we take for granted, being New Yorkers, Americans, and international travelers. Like electricity. Sure, not having power sucks, we've all had that experience. Mukendi's house, which he built himself outside of Lubumbashi, doesn't have power at all. When he lived in the center, the current was on and off so often, and the voltage up and down, that he says it doesn't matter much to not have it now. "Electricity is in my DNA," says Mukendi. His father was an electrician. His mother, a typist in Gécamines City, brought home cardboard boxes, that he calls "occidental containers." The inception of his sculpting practice occurred with these boxes; what he wanted but didn't have, he made from cardboard. He trained to be a professional electrician, and later went to university in Lubumbashi for mathematics and statistics. After college, Mukendi progressed to building powered sculptures, dramatizing the flow of energy. His obsessively engineered analog machines serve as alternative working versions of mechanized, electronic stereotypes, imbued with new functionality.

Raw materials are fundamental to Mukendi's work. He calls himself a kleptomaniac, but I think what he means is hoarder. The gallery became Mukendi's stash, stuffed to the gills. Mukendi's home, the DRC, is most likely where the copper for those mini sculptures comes from. And the eight grams of cobalt in your pocket that you've been massaging all day - that comes from Mukendi's region. The US and China are locked in a trade war over the supply of cobalt, because it's necessary for lithium ion batteries - every smart phone, every electric car. Getting it out of the ground is a disaster called "artisanal mining," performed by amateurs, and very often children. Read up on it below, for yet another reason why smartphones are disgusting. Mukendi's works are the supporting materials for his vision of an enriched Africa as part of a future world economy, in which the benefits enjoyed from the use of technology are shared with the countries from which the raw materials for that technology are taken. That's why Mukendi invented the Afrolampe, a masterpiece of visual science fiction spanning more than a hundred drawings, each one a unique manifestation of philsophy and geometry that proposes the lights Africa needs, to accumulate and activate knowledge. For Mukendi, the future is about working late. He's an 8am - 9pm kind of artist, seven days a week. To work with him was awe inspiring. Mukendi touches everything, Mukendi is everywhere. He is the common denominator. The algorithm for the Mukendi Sequence? A roll of his Dice.

"There are issues in Lubumbashi, and there are issues here," says Mukendi. "The negative issues here would be positive issues for us. I am the bridge. I am an immigrant everywhere I go, even in the Congo where I am from. New York is metropolitan - it can host everyone, from everywhere, everyday. New York is the demonstration of power, and the opposite of power. You find the symmetry in the mirror. Perfect symmetry, reversible. Electricity on, electricity off. Now is the chance to do things differently."

Jean Katambayi Mukendi was born in 1974 in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. He lives and works in Lubumbashi. This exhibition is his second at Ramiken, and his first trip to the United States, using the gallery in New York as his studio during the summer of 2023.

Mukendi’s work has been exhibited at Kunsthalle Kohta (2023), The Drawing Center in New York (2022), the Congo Pavilion at the Triennale di Milano (2022), Wiels (2019, 2016), Center Pompidou-Metz (2021), Mid- delheim Museum (2021), Museum für Völkerkunde (2018), Kultuurstiftung des Bundes (2017), Palazzo Reale (2016), Palais De Tokyo (2015), Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary in Vienna (2015), M HKA Antwerp (2015, 2017), Mu.Zee in Oostende (2015), and the Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Brussels (2015). In 2016 he had his first solo gallery exhibition at Trampoline Gallery in Antwerp, organized by Simon Delobel. He participated in the Biennale Taipei (2020), the 4th and 5th Lubumbashi Biennales (2015, 2017), the 12th Havana Biennale (2015), the 11th Dakar Biennale (2014), and the Kinshasa Biennale (2014). In 2016 he was an artist in residence at Wiels in Brussels and was featured at Wiels in Multiple Transmissions: Art in the Afro-politan Age, curated by Sandrine Colard. He is featured in the recently published African Artists: From 1882 to Now, published by Phaidon in 2021. His acclaimed first solo exhibition at Ramiken in November 2020 was reviewed in The New York Times, Frieze, and Artforum. Mukendi’s work will next appear in the Zürich Biennial, opening on October 7, 2023; and Manifesta 15 in Barcelona, in 2024. His works are in the public collections of the Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College and the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago.